Canadian Flying Buttress
Lighthouses

Among all Canadian lighthouses, the "flying buttress" towers
are perhaps the most striking. There were originally nine of these towers,
all built from a set of plans drawn by William P. Anderson, Chief Engineer
and Superintendent of Lighthouses for the Department of Marine and Fisheries,
and all built in a few years around 1910. Six of the nine survive. They
are:

Belle Isle Northeast, Newfoundland

Escarpement Bagot (Bagot Bluff), Île d'Anticosti, Québec

Pointe-au-Père, St. Lawrence River, Québec

Caribou Island, Lake Superior, Ontario

Michipicoten Island, Lake Superior, Ontario

Estevan Point, Vancouver Island, British Columbia

Three additional examples were demolished during the 1960s. They are:

Cape Norman, Newfoundland

Cape Bauld, Newfoundland

Cape Anguille, Newfoundland

The photo at right is of the Caribou Island Light as it appeared a few
years ago, before the last of the light station buildings was removed.
It shows the basic plan of the lighthouses clearly: a square central column
with six graceful flying buttresses, supporting a large circular lantern
room.

There is some disagreement between references as to the
height of the Caribou Island Light, but older references give the height
as 104 ft (about 32 m). The tallest of the flying-buttressed towers, at
33 meters (108 ft), is apparently the Phare Pointe-au-Père near
Rimouski, Québec. Although Point-au-Père has been inactive
since 1975, it is preserved as a National Historic Site, and the light
station buildings now house a popular maritime museum, the Musée
de la Mer. The lighthouse is completely restored and carries its original
third-order Fresnel lens in the lantern. The museum and lighthouse are
open daily from early June through mid October.

Anderson made the first test of his flying buttress design
in 1907 at Cape Norman, in northernmost Newfoundland, on the south side
of the entrance to the Strait of Belle Isle. (Newfoundland didn't become
a province of Canada until 1949, but Canada built and maintained the lighthouses
along the Strait of Belle Isle, the shortest route for ships sailing to
Canada from Europe.) The lighthouse was 17 meters tall (about 55 ft).
It was replaced by a rather ordinary concrete lighthouse in 1964.

The nearby Belle Isle Northeast Light was built as a cylindrical
cast iron tower in 1905. Three years later, Anderson encased the tower
in an octagonal concrete tower and added eight flying buttresses. This
substantial upgrade made it possible for the lighthouse to support a much
larger lantern and lens.

Canadian Coast Guard photo provided by Michel Forand

The flying buttress design was the ultimate development of what Anderson called
"ferro-concrete" lighthouse design, a marriage of steel and concrete to produce
unusually sturdy towers. The central column has steel pillars at the corners,
and each of the six buttresses is steel clad in concrete. The resulting lighthouses
are durable through the most ferocious weather and relatively easy to maintain.

Belle Isle Northeast Light remains in service, and the light station buildings
were intact at last report. Neither of the Québec towers is active today,
and there is much concern about preservation of the Escarpement Bagot tower
on the remote Île d'Anticosti. The two Lake Superior towers are both active,
but no longer staffed; the buildings other than the light towers have been demolished
at both stations. Estevan Point, on the wild Pacific coast of Vancouver Island,
remains an active and staffed Coast Guard light station.

The photos below show the Caribou Island Light under construction in 1910.
These photos were taken by Col. Anderson himself, according to David Baird in
Northern Lights: Lighthouses of Canada (p. 197). Special thanks
to Ron Walker of the Canadian Coast Guard, Parry Sound, Ontario, for making
these historic images available from the Coast Guard's files, and to Michel
Forand for providing historical background.